Much of this cultural ferment originated in Vienna’s lively Jewish community, which dated all the way back to the twelfth century. Gustav Mahler’s music echoed from radios and concert halls, while Jewish patrons commissioned the exquisite paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele displayed in local galleries. In the years after the First World War, one in five inhabitants of the city were Jews, as were many of the faculty members who taught at the university.
